Steve Jobs: Flash is a CPU Hog

After the pompous launch of the iPhone OS laden iPad Tablet, Apple CEO Steve Jobs got busy with tours at several media houses in the US. During a recent visit to The Wall Street Journal office, Jobs took an opportunity to blame Flash and held it responsible for being a CPU resource hog, a source of security holes and also being reason for crashingMacs, reported Gawker. If you recall, Jobs had fired snarky comments against Adobe recently.

Apple and Adobe haven't been able to join hands in years to bring Flash platform for Mac OS and iPhone OS. Infact, Adobe has introduced Flash wrapped in different package but not for the iPhone browser. The WSJ office visit wasn't the first time when Jobs criticized Flash for crashing Mac systems. Besides calling Flash a CPU hog and source of security holes , he went ahead and said We don't spend a lot of energy on old technology . However, he did admit that ditching Flash entirely would be trivial.

Flash has been the trouble maker for Mac systems which is why it's absent even on iPhone and the upcoming iPad. Adobe's Flash Lite version wasn't CPU-efficient enough for iPhone platform hence wasn't able to make it.

In defense of Flash, Anup Murarka, Adobe's director of technology strategy and partner development, told ZDNet UK that any performance issues on the Mac are not caused by Flash, and he suggested that software products from other vendors also suffer when they run on Macs. Citing technical aspects Murarka said, Mac OS libraries come with more overhead than their Windows equivalents," he said. "Apps run faster on Windows than Mac OS [they're] generally about 20 percent slower using the GCC compiler.

While Apple shows the cold shoulder to Flash, Adobe continues to push the Flash to Android, Linux and Windows based Tablets. The cold war between Adobe and Apple is slowly heating up. It wouldn't come as a surprise if Microsoft takes a chance and pushes their Silverlight technology (if it were possible) for iPhone and Mac OS. Now, that would be interesting!